Europe's AI firms, playing catch-up, challenge US

What happened

Europe's leading AI company Mistral and others have accused US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic's calls for advanced developers to slow down as Europe struggles to catch up.

"It's not time to slow down but to accelerate," CEO of French-American software company Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, said on X last week. However, he endorsed Amodei's proposal to embed "independent evaluators" inside AI companies. Amodei argued that AI development is moving faster than governments can regulate.

Why it matters

Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, in an online essay, urged firms to slow the pace at which they improve AI model capabilities and called for an antitrust waiver allowing leading developers to jointly develop safety measures after researchers warned about the dangers of AI, including that it could wipe out humanity.

While OpenAI's chief Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk also warned about the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems and agreed on the need to pace development, companies and officials in Europe have taken a more sceptical line.

"Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to favour them over competitors," said French startup Mistral in a statement, noting that the risks had already been clear for months. Europe has produced few frontier AI developers, with 3-year-old Mistral seen as the region's best hope for developing its own frontier AI model to challenge US and Chinese dominance.

"I think this is totally self-serving," Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss privacy software company Proton, told a tech event in Paris on Wednesday. " Ben Brooks, head of public policy at German AI startup Black Forest Labs, said moves to enforce a gap between big labs and new entrants "on the basis of arbitrary thresholds will chill open innovation at or near the frontier".

What to watch

In his essay, he said leading developers should voluntarily coordinate on safety standards and submit to oversight by permanent embedded evaluators that would monitor compliance. "Unfortunately, passing laws can take time, and AI is advancing very quickly. European policymakers and industry groups voiced similar concerns.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU's landmark rules governing AI use put the bloc in a position to shape global efforts to tackle the risks. Britain's King Charles hosted tech and AI leaders to discuss the issues at a summit in Scotland on Thursday. "For European firms, this debate is irrelevant. We first need to catch up on our technological backlog," Abbou said.